I think extreme energy efficiency is a great thing to go after for a new semiconductor company. It fits the "surf someone else's wave" principle well. Big companies are of course trying to do this to, but focused startups beat big companies all the time.

Don't worry about being a low-level hardware company. It's a feature for you, not a bug, that there aren't many startups doing that. You can look a lot like a software company that produces a piece of hardware.

When will your first chip be ready? Who is going to manufacture it?

Who will be your first customers, and how much better will your chip be than whatever they are using now?

How much money will you need to get that first chip to market?

We're looking at having full simulation capabilities (with physical verification in progress) come the end of this year, with a shuttle run (prototype) tape out in Q1 next year. It's about a 3 month turn around, so we are expecting to have our first 100 prototype chips in the ~May-June timeframe next year. From there, we'll be putting together 20-25 evaluation units (consisting of 4 of our chips put together), and selling those... we have 4 order commitments already, which almost cover the cost of getting the prototypes made (though we are not reliant on that, as we now have outside funding). We'll be using TSMC (the largest pure-play semi foundry) and their 28nm process (with the very slim possibility of going down to 16/20nm if the price is right at that point).

Right now, our connections are primarily in academia and government, so they are the people we have talked to the most and have said they will put money up, and we do have some government grant funding. I do not want government and academia to be our primary focus though (Any thoughts on that?), although early non dilutive funding is nice. For the applications we have specced out that they care about, we are showing around a 10x efficiency increase for dense matrix applications (over top of the line CPUs and GPUs currently used), and even enabling some applications that were not really practical on existing systems. I can't go into too much detail on those publicly, but can talk about them offline.

When it comes to our best application space, and what I would like to target, is the signal processing and mobile basestation space. Our best performance and efficiency (25x the best CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs at the moment) comes with FFTs, and we're capable of doing next generation large FFTs better than the best DSPs are at doing the current generation types. The few people (mostly academics in the field) I have talked to in this think this is a big game changer for that industry, and the problem we have is that we don't really have any connections in the industry itself. My idea has been we should try to build up as much evidence before talking to more people in it.

While I have talked about two areas, our architecture isn't really limited to any one, it just performs exceptionally well for those... but planning for wider market adoption is I think too far ahead of us at this point.

With our current funding, we'll be able to get through making 100 (16 core) prototype chips, build those into evaluation units, and test them with customers... from there, doing a full tape out and getting the full 256 core chip to market will be another $10 to $15 million, and we expect to be able to tape out and go into mass production in the first half of 2017.

Question: Do you think the Thiel-style monopoly approach would work in our case? I initially imagined we would be able to enter and do very well in the High Performance/Supercomputing area, eat up market share from the big guys (Intel, NVIDIA, etc) who don't care about the "small" HPC market. From there, expand to large business data centers (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) and mobile basestation systems, and so on until we hit mass market devices. Do you think this is a decent (although very simply described for brevity) plan for the 3 to 5 year timeframe?

I don't know the numbers, but suppose for example that there are 100,000 base stations that currently use 100 watts each doing the DSP. That's 10,000,000 watts total, costing about $10M/yr at $0.12 / kWh utility rates. If you can save 80% and capture 1/3 of the savings for the first 2 years (typical of efficiency improvement sales), you make $5.3M. If it costs $15M to design the chips, that's a bad business.

To have a good business doing energy-efficient chips, you'd need to target applications burning a billion watts from the grid, so you can make a fraction of a billion dollars.

The mobile device market values energy efficiency much higher than $0.12 / kWh. That might be a better domain to target.

This would require a radically different marketing strategy, but what if they partnered with artists and sculptors and the advertising departments of the companies whose property the base stations would be located on? A mobile base station is usually designed to be as inconspicuous as possible; what if they flipped that around and turned a bunch of them into public art installations? The sales pitch to companies would be "Show your customers that you care about the planet, and get them talking about your brand." That's an advertising business, where they could charge way more than the power savings business.

Although mobile device market is certainly better target as a market.

I'd focus less on academia and government. They are usually difficult investors and difficult first customers. Non-dilutive funding is nice, but dilution is not so bad in a binary-outcome situation, and venture investors are usually far faster and more helpful.

I think taking over the "small" HPC market first is a very good plan.

One more question: I'm an engineer at heart, and I want to stay involved in engineering at some level, but don't want to give up control of the direction of the company. Do you think it makes sense/is possible to be CEO and still be involved in doing day to day engineering/design work, and if so any tips on balancing that? If not, at what point does it make sense to bring in a "professional" CEO?

Thanks for the feedback! Would love to grab coffee if you're interested... feel free to send me an email.

http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos/

http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_founders_fail_the_product_ceo_p...

The biggest problem for hard technical problems is the storytelling. I went through your site and I couldn't find the sentences I would need to make someone else excited about what you're making in a conversational way. It should feel like you're making something science fiction a reality through your technology alone. That storytelling is what you'll need to convince/inspire customers, investors and future employees.

Thanks! I really need to update the website as it is based on our (unsuccessful) fundraising pitch... thankfully, we had some great feedback a couple of months ago on storytelling, and it really improved our pitch and we were able to close a round. I'll make updating our website a priority this weekend.

Right now, it is best for signal processing applications and dense matrix (although it is not limited to that). To give you some actual applications, think mobile base station processing (Everything from your wifi router to big cell antennas, small cells, etc), computer vision/image processing, video rendering, machine learning (both convolutional neural networks and recurrent NNs), plus a bunch more to long to list. The new abilities that we are providing is that we can fit the performance of a high end system with ~300 watt GPU (which also needs a ~100 watt CPU attached to it), for say machine learning, in a 4 watt power budget.

The simple story that we've come up with is this:

30 years ago when existing computer architectures were designed, the power cost of moving data and processing it were roughly equal, but things have changed. Today, it takes 100 picojoules to do a double precision floating point operation, but 4200 picojoules (42 times!) more energy to move that data from RAM to your registers. We're solving that (among many other problems overlooked by the rest of the industry)problem through a new design rather than a radical new technology in order to achieve over a 10x energy efficiency increase over existing systems.

I typically have a more succinct oral pitch with accompanying presentation... hopefully this came through clearly. Any feedback would be apppreciated!

This is a fascinating observation. As one of pg's essays asks, "what do you know that know that no one else knows?" [quoted from memory]. It sounds like this is your answer. Interestingly, it's not literally that no one else knows it -- it's that no one else (AFAIK, of course) has factored it into their designs, as doing so probably requires more-or-less a clean sheet.